Does your hotel or property suffer from high occupancy on the weekends but low demand during the week?
NB: This is an article from gcommerce
Maybe this only happens during specific seasons or months, but whatever the cause, you are not alone! In fact, many hoteliers find themselves stuck in the rut of minimal midweek stays. While there are many different approaches to alleviating this issue, we’re going to focus on how you can increase midweek stays through Facebook advertising for hotels. Not only is Facebook easy to use, but it’s also cost-effective because you can run campaigns for only a few dollars per day and enjoy lower CPCs and higher engagement than other ad platforms.
Take a look below for a few tips and tricks when it comes to advertising midweek campaigns for hotels on Facebook.
It All Starts with A Facebook Audience
Exact Match Facebook Audience
The first step to creating any Facebook advertising campaign is to create your audience. While you could continue focusing on the audiences you use for your hotel’s regular Facebook campaigns, a more focused approach might prove better in the long run. After all, if those same Facebook audiences were good enough for your hotel’s midweek campaigns, they’d already be converting that way.
Instead, we suggest creating an exact match list on Facebook of customers who have stayed midweek at your hotel in the past. Whether you want to target all midweek guests within the past two years or by season, using this targeted approach will be a great starting point for getting your message in front of the right audience on Facebook.
An example of this concept could be uploading a list for everyone who stayed at your hotel midweek last summer and targeting them with a summer midweek promotion.
Lookalike Facebook Audience List
Once you have your exact match Facebook audience created, you can take it to the next level and make a lookalike Facebook audience based on that list. By creating a lookalike audience, you’ll be able to target a fresh pool of potential hotel guests who are similar to those on your hotel’s exact match list. This also allows your booking funnel to be continually refreshed and lessens the likelihood that your retargeting list gets stale.
Once you’ve got your new adset loaded with this lookalike audience, dial it down further by utilizing interests, behaviors, and demographics. Is your midweek hotel guest a parent? Married? Do they have a certain education level or work in a particular industry? Maybe they are frequent travelers or have interest in your metro area and its big attractions. Whatever your midweek persona is, using detailed targeting helps narrow your audience even further to ensure your impressions and clicks are more qualified than a general audience.
At GCommerce, we like to target business travelers in particular for these campaigns, as they are typically an audience that stays midweek. How do you target business travelers for your hotel? You could start by filtering through demographic targeting such as specific industries, employers, and even job titles. From there you can dive more into behaviors, such as frequent travelers and frequent international travelers and then narrow it further by interests that business travelers might have.
Creating Midweek Ads For Your Hotel
Your hotel’s midweek Facebook audiences are set up and ready to run, great! But now comes the part of actually drawing them in and getting that click-through to the website. When your hotel is struggling with midweek occupancy, running a midweek offer or promotion is a great way to encourage bookings. However, a midweek offer doesn’t always have to be a percentage off or a free night.
Here are a few of our favorite “offers” for increasing midweek stays:
- Stay Longer, Save More – give 10% off for booking three-plus nights
- Complimentary Midweek Happy Hours – provide a free drink or a glass of wine in the lobby or bar after 5 PM during the week (this is great for business travelers!)
- Free Breakfast – complimentary breakfast for midweek stays (again, great for business travel)
- Book 3 Nights, Get 1 Free – this is a great way to extend your hotel’s midweek audience
- Free Upgrades During Midweek – why not offer to upgrade that standard hotel room to a deluxe, or deluxe hotel rooms to suites (based on availability)?
- Host Meetings and Events – offer up meeting and event packages or free stays for hosting at your property
- Rewards Program – if you don’t already have a rewards program in place, offering rewards for midweek stays is another great ploy for both frequent and business travelers
Alternatively, though not technically an offer, hosting midweek events and activities such as live music or other performances is also a great draw to use in your hotel’s Facebook ads.
Use Creative Messaging That Speaks to Your Audience
So now we’ve got our Facebook midweek audience and formulated an offer; the next step is to tie everything together through creative messaging. Your hotel’s Facebook ad messaging should align with your audience and offer, but should also be fun and eye-catching.
Below we came up with a few examples that could tug on potential guests’ heartstrings:
- Are you trying to get your weekend guests to book an additional day?
- Play hooky
- Extend your weekend getaway
- Stay longer and get an additional night on us
- Are you targeting people to visit during off-season?
- Avoid the crowds
- Save more when you travel during non-peak months
- Are you targeting corporate travel?
- Travel for work doesn’t need to be boring!
- Long day at the office? Get everything you need right here!
Now that you’ve got the tools for success, it’s time to start strategizing and getting your hotel’s own midweek Facebook campaigns into place. Facebook might be a small and relatively easy way to start boosting your midweek activity, but in the long run, it can prove to be extremely effective when it comes to engaging your past customers and improving your hotel’s current marketing audience lists.
